It is common practice for contact centers to record all communications involving their agents. In many industries there is a regulatory or legal requirement to archive such recordings, and even without such requirements, it is important for contact centers to retain accurate records for use in possible litigation or dispute resolution. Recorded communication sessions are also used to assist in agent training and evaluation.
In a typical contact center, a call recording device will be conferenced into each call as soon as an agent initiates the call (in the case of outbound calls), or as soon as a call is transferred to an agent (in the case of inbound calls or calls transferred from another switch forming part of the contact center organisation). The switch or call server through which the call is connected conferences in the call recording device so that the conversation between the customer and the agent is automatically recorded.
The call recording device therefore maintains a copy of the conversation which is time stamped and which may also include some additional data passed by the switch or call server, such as the directory number of the participating agent and the dialled number or the calling line identification of the customer. The switch or call server does not of course, maintain a copy of the conversation, since that is a specialised task for a call recording device. Nevertheless, the switch will typically maintain its own data records for each call, in which it notes the various events occurring such as call initiation, call termination, call transfers, on hold events, etc.
In the event that it is necessary to retrieve the recording of a call, the usual method is to use the time and date of the call to narrow down to a set of specific records. If other data, such as the telephone number of the customer, is provided to the call recording device by the switch or exchange handling the call, and if this information is stored along with the actual recording, then this can be used as a searchable field, as can the agent's directory number and so on. The task becomes considerably more difficult, however, in networked contact centers which have been built from equipment supplied by different vendors. In such cases, the degree of integration between the individual switches and call services is lower, and often only minimal data is passed to the call recording device. In such cases the call record at the call recording device is identifiable only by the time stamp information. There is, of course, no guarantee that the time stamp is accurate or that the clock in one piece of equipment is synchronized with the other pieces of equipment.
Even when the correct recording has been identified (and this normally involves listening to a number of candidate recordings to manually identify the correct one), this is usually not sufficient proof in cases where there is a dispute involving litigation. In such cases, it is imperative that an evidentiary chain can be provided to the court which positively identifies the call recording by matching it with the call switching events as recorded on the call servers, switches, exchanges or terminals of the contact center, since it is these events which are most objective and which can be directly matched against public records such as those maintained by the telephone networks.
This matching task is again made more difficult if the records of one or more of the items of equipment are incomplete or if only minimal information is passed between the various participating items of equipment, particularly in cases of multi-vendor solutions. In cases where the call recording device records are limited to a couple of time stamps, there may be insufficient data to match against the more extensive records maintained by the switch, especially if there is a mismatch between the respective clocks.
While the discussion thus far has been centred on the recording of voice calls in a contact center, it will be apparent that similar problems will arise in recording other types of communications sessions, including recording video calls, chat sessions and instant messaging sessions. Also, while the problems described have been in relation to a contact center, where there is currently the greatest need for a solution to these problems, similar problems will arise when trying to match communications session events recorded on a server or switch with an actual recording of a session on another device.